Although the sexes were housed in separate barracks at Westerbork, Mr. Frank was able to visit his wife and daughters in the women's barracks. His presence was reassuring, and when Anne fell sick, he came over every evening, stood beside her bed for hours and told her stories. After being kept in the Westerbork camp for a few weeks, the Franks, the Van Daans, and Mr. Düssel were herded into a shipment of one thousand persons and sent to Auschwitz. This was the very last shipment to leave Holland. The people traveled in crowded, sealed cattle cars for three days and nights. At Auschwitz, men and women were separated, and that was the last Mr. Frank ever saw of his family.
When the SS guards left Auschwitz in January 1945, in order to escape the approaching Allies, they took most of the inmates of the camp with them, forcing them to march through the countryside barefoot, in rags, and without proper food. Mr. Frank was in the camp infirmary, and so he was spared. He was in Auschwitz when it was liberated by the Russians in February.
After the war, Mr. Frank returned to Holland via Odessa and Marseilles on board the New Zealand ship The Monaway, which brought concentration camp survivors from East to West Europe. He contacted the people who had helped him and his family while they were in hiding in Amsterdam, and Elli and Miep (as noted above) handed over to him the papers in Anne's handwriting which they had found on the floor of the "Secret Annexe" the day the Gestapo had come and taken the group away.
Otto Frank, as described by the writer Ernst Schnabel, was: ". . . a tall, spare man, highly intelligent, cultured and well-educated, extremely modest and extremely kind. He survived the persecutions, but it is difficult and painful for him to talk on the subject, for he lost more than can be gained by mere survival."
He survived until he was in his nineties and died in Amsterdam in 1980.
